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A lovely puzzle from Crucible, and on the easy side for a prize puzzle, I thought.

Once you’ve solved the clues, the rubric reads “Five COLOURS of the RAINBOW appear as solutions, not further defined in their clues; nor are COLOURS and RAINBOW. The other two are hidden in the grid, one of them in two places.” GREEN is hidden across “meaGRE ENvision” while RED is hidden in “tailoRED” and “REDrafts”. I’ve marked the colours of the rainbow with asterixesasterisks below.

Thanks to to NeilW for pointing out that this is a pangram, i.e. every letter of the alphabet appears in the grid.

Double definitione: “Superior” (for Lake Superior) and “pigment” – one definition of “lake” in Chambers is “a reddish pigment originally derived from lac”. The question-mark here must be for “Superior”, which is a definition by example…

3.

MEAGRE

MERE = “Nothing better” (one of the definitions in Chambers) around A + G = “good”; Definition: “if you’re this?” in the context of the whole clue

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under Guardian.
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16 Responses to “Guardian 25,496 / Crucible”

I found this one a lot more difficult than usual. 1 and 15 were my last entries and I don’t like either of them much. Since when has p been an abbreviation for PRIEST? Fr and eli I know but not just p. And why SUIT? Since when has that been synonymous with TENSE in the grammatical sense? I suppose BLOCK could mean ‘surround’ but it stretches a long bow.

I just wanted to get that off my chest RCW. Please bear with my pedantry.

Thanks, mhl, for a great blog. I presume you were thinking of OBELIX when you put ‘asterixes’ in the preamble instead of ‘asterisks’. Or was that deliberate?

I didn’t find this quite as easy as you seemed to have done, but it was a fair and very enjoyable challenge. BLUE was my key to the theme (which I probably should have spotted immediately, instead of several clues in).

A lot of good clues and surfaces. I particularly liked 2d for its concision and (unstated) link to the theme.

23a was slightly disappointing, although ingeniously constructed, because LIMOUSINE is the (feminine form of) the adjective meaning ‘coming from Limousin’ (the former province centred on Limoges), so is less cryptic than it might have been. The car is supposedly so called because it had a hood reminicent of the headgear traditionally worn by the Limousins.

I enjoyed this but tend to agree that it wasn’t more difficult than a lot of the weeklies that have appeared of late but I think it was above average compared to recent prizes that seem, with a few exceptions, to have become noticeably easier. (Haven’t looked at today’s yet…)

I know there has been a bit of negative comment recently about them but I admire these pangrams, especially in a puzzle whose theme is “all the colours of the rainbow!”

A lot of fun. About halfway through I guessed the “seven” things were the colors of the rainbow (although there are only six really). My big lame question is this, since I am too lazy to work it out myself: is this a “pangram” (uses all letters of the alphabet)? The use of the high-scoring scrabble letters started jumping out at me – Q, Y, Z, W, X, etc.

My last entry was LAKE at 2 – helped by the lack, so far, of a K.

Thanks for the “just right” difficulty level, Crucible, and the blog, mhl!

Thanks mhl. The instructions looked worrying but I got 7d in the first minute and with this and the rhythm of the instructions went filled in six more answers, too easy. Favourite clues were OBELIX and HOUND DOG. Least favourite was last one in, 15a.

‘Special instructions’ initially looked daunting but the mystery soon unravelled, although I did hold myself up unnecessarily by confidently entering RADIUS for ‘circle line’ and vainly looking for hidden oranges!

Many thanks to Crucible and mhl: most enjoyable. To BgglesA@1. It may be a bit RC, but I’m very used to ‘PP’ for ‘Parish Priest’ and therefore have little trouble with ‘P’ for ‘Priest’. I’ve met it before in puzzles.

An excellent puzzle with some witty clues. I didn’t notice it was a pangram – I gave up looking after one a couple of weeks ago when I had been pleased to signal it and the response seemed to be ‘how boring’!

I agree with Gervase about Limousines. Given the word links directly to Limoges and Limo is a customary abbreviation for it, there didn’t seem much cryptic content left.

Tupu @10 – I was struggling with my last in – 8ac – until I realised that in order for the puzzle to be a pangram there needed to be a J in the solution. Hey presto: Sarajevo! So, not boring – useful….

I forgot to mention that I did spot that the puzzle was a pangram, which helped with a few recalcitrant answers. Strangely, pangrams are something that I usually DO notice, unlike Ninas or hidden themes. My most egregious ‘failure to notice’ was in a Brummie puzzle a few years ago, which contained the words SNOW and WHITE, as well as the names of all seven dwarfs. But because he hadn’t flagged it up, I missed it entirely, despite finishing the crossword. D’oh!

Thanks mhl for the blog. As a useless piece of additional information, I found that a pre-Elvis country version of HOUND DOG by Charlie Gore & Louis Innis was recorded at King studios – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_(song)